Sunday, August 7, 2011

Make Pickles

Saturday was our weekly trip to the Farmer’s Market. This week Daniel and Hannah of Easy Yoke Farm had set aside two boxes of pickling cucumbers. Anita is a pickle fanatic and needs lots. Jars and jars. I heard her barter a trade with them: this week she will weed their carrot patch in exchange for cucumbers, dill, garlic and onions. She did ask, how big is it? 40 acres? “Naw,” said Daniel, “that would be Joe’s patch.”

The recipe for garlic dill pickles calls for cucumbers to soak overnight in cold water, whereas the bread & butter pickles only need three hours in icy salt water. So webegan. I love how cucumbers smell - clean and fresh - and how the sweet vinegary smell of the brine floods your nose and your hands get saturated with onions and garlic, so when you sleep at night with your hands under your cheek you dream of pickles. Denis joined the slicing and ladling of hot pickles into jars. About two thirds of the way through we realized we needed more jars and I was impatient with the dishwasher taking too long to sterilize another batch. So I grabbed them out saying, “I know. My mother did this.” All I needed was a shallow pan, so I put a cake pan on the electric burner turned on high, placed the jars upside down in two inches of water and waited for them to get really, really hot. Then I was like, wait. Who cares? This is PICKLING. The vinegar will kill anything that dares move. As they bubbled away, Denis picked the pints out one by one and filled them and Anita wiped the rims and put on the lids. Done! 24 jars!

Later, as we were cleaning up Anita was going to dump the water out of the cake pan, but found it oddly stuck to the burner. What the..? Denis tried prying it off and finally had to horse the burner up with the pan welded to the top. He managed to pop off the pan, but there was no saving either. So I no longer advise this method of “sterilizing” jars. Besides the risk, it isn’t very cost effective. And perhaps my mother DIDN’T do that. Perhaps I imagined it. Still, those pickles are really good and not that hard to make.

Margie ~ I have always sterilized my jars like this and have never had a problem. But, I have a gas stove if that may be the difference. Hey ~ nothing wrong with a new stove :) Just did the same pickles last week ~ yummm!

Book Sales

Hi Friends, Here is my Holiday (almost) Special!
God in the Sink $13.95 (includes shipping).
Order it for someone you love. Or someone you should love!
Thank you for helping launch this book. It wouldn't happen without you.
I would love to send a signed copy. Contact me at margiehaack@ gmail.com. online
Also available for $17.95 (includes shipping) The Exact Place: A Memoir
width:class="sqitem"href="https://squareup.com/market/margie-haack/god-in-the-sink">"God in the Sink" from Margie Haack

Toads Drink Coffee

Contributors

Coffee Favorite

Japanese Coffee art: "Kitty chasing fish latte."

Toads, etc.

For many years we lived in Toad Hall, an old American Gothic Foursquare house named for the mansion in Wind in the Willows although ours wasn’t really a mansion, the kids just thought it was. Now we live in a different home – one more suited to aging with dignity – yes, well, we can hope – The House Between. “Between” because we are living that stage of life between now and what is to come. Sound a little macabre? It’s not. We needed move to a space with main floor accessibility for older people who may not always be able to climb stairs to sleep and eliminate. We love this home in a quiet neighborhood with offices overooking the wooded ravine behind where we feed birds and watch coyotes play leap frog. We love knowing, too, that this is not our final place – there is more healing and goodness in the next life. I’ve kept the name of my blog toadsdrinkcoffee because I don’t know how to migrate to a new one. The name is now even more obscure, but it had to do with living in Toad Hall and my addiction to coffee. However, I did migrate my old publication – Notes From Toad Hall– to the new one Letters from the House Between.